Abstract:

The increasing pitched battle between nations, governments, cyber warriors, and corporations are now glaring. For nations, cyber weapons serve as deterrence to non-allies perceived as adversaries.  First among the most famous, is the US-Israel Stuxnet covert cyberattack on Iran's nuclear program, a virus that temporarily disabled Iranian nuclear facilities in 2010. Next, is the alleged Russian cyberattacks that targeted the US 2016 Presidential election.  In June 2019 also, President Trump, approved a clandestine operation to destroy a key database used by the Iranian military to target oil-carrying ships. By September 2019, a supposed Iranian attack was launched on Saudi oil installations, shutting down half of Saudi Arabia's oil production.  David Sanger, a New York Times Washington Correspondent, describes the cyberweapons used in these battles as the perfect weapon. Other common cyberweapons include espionage, denial-of-service and distributed denial-of-service, man-in-the-middle attack, phishing, and spear-phishing attacks, drive-by-attacks, password attacks, SQL-injection-attacks, eavesdropping attack, malware attack, birthday attacks, and all sorts of espionage. To raise awareness of these weapons and to foster a global culture of cybersecurity, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) conducts a Global Cybersecurity survey. First launched in 2014 to raise awareness, the survey measured the commitment of Member States to cybersecurity. The second iteration in 2017 measured the commitment of ITU Member States to cybersecurity with the goal to drive further efforts in the adoption and integration of cybersecurity on a global scale. The current study compares the 2014 and 2017 ITU findings with the rate at which nations are talking cyberwar on the media. It also compares the rate of annual attacks per nation and its GCA performance. Are high performers prone to less successful attacks? Is there a correlation between each nation's commitment, the rate of annual attacks and how much it chants cyberwar on media outlets? Findings on the rate, nature, and magnitude of annual attacks on nations talking cyberwar are discussed with relation to their performance on the five pillars (legal, technical, organizational, capacity building and cooperation) of the Global Cybersecurity Agenda (GCA). The study reveals gaps for policy options within nations chattering cyberwar but committed to the global cybersecurity agenda.